If last night’s yawner of a debate wasn’t enough self-inflicted punishment, the Republicans bring you a warmed up plate of leftovers in another debate this morning. It begins when most sensible people are still asleep or enjoying a quiet morning, at 6:00 am PST/9:00 am EST on NBC in Meet the Press’ time slot. It should be streaming live at http://msnbc.com or http://nbc.com .

You are invited to join your fellow Planeteers here for a live blog during the debate. Because of the early hour, there may be less members participating but please don’t let that discourage your posting comments, those who aren’t around will be coming here first thing to read your takes on the debate.

Who knows, maybe after seeing the reviews of their lackluster performances, Santorum and Gingrich will come out swinging against Romney. On the other hand, they may well continue fighting each other for who gets to come in 2nd place while Romney cruises to winning the nom.

Still, there are many reasons to watch and live blog. Huntsman may call Romney “Douche!” in Chinese and Romney might nod and smile. Ron Paul might pull out an Area 51 folder and expose secrets about aliens that have been hidden from the public. Rick Santorum may invent a new religion just so he can hate it. Newt Gingrich may declare that people aren’t born black, it’s a choice poor people make.

Can’t say for sure but I’d think they were playing a very “conservative” game that night, hoping Romney would just trip up on his own. When that didn’t happen and the reviews came out saying how all they did was help Romney, they came back in a last gasp to go after him.

Timidity is contagious in these debates, as is hostility. Maybe each of them were waiting for an opening created by someone else, let another candidate be seen as starting the mud throwing then they could just jump in.

In any case, we’re now seeing a real onslaught against Romney and I do think it’s a real possibility that his win in NH is seen as a smaller margin than it should be, damaging him in SC.

And with Newt running $3 million in ads against Romney, portraying him as a cutthroat, greedy job killer, who knows what will happen down there.

They played it safe on Saturday each hoping the other would strike out at their common target. Timidity is indeed catching.

I have seen three segments of the Gingrich SuperPac re. Romney’s life at Bain. They are devastating. The Romney campaign is taking notice.

“It’s puzzling to see Speaker Gingrich and his supporters continue their attacks on free enterprise,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul wrote in an e-mail responding to the latest video. “This is the type of criticism we’ve come to expect from President Obama and his left-wing allies at Moveon.org. Unlike President Obama and Speaker Gingrich, Mitt Romney spent his career in business and knows what it will take to turn around our nation’s bad economy.”

Gingrich himself weighed in on the story this afternoon, speaking to reporters following a town hall in Manchester. “Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation, would find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out pretty clever ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job,” Gingrich said.

I Tivoed the debate and wow, this was the debate we had hoped for last night.

Two of the biggest highlights:

When Huntsman responded to Romney’s diss of him for working for Obama and nailed Romney for not putting country first as Huntsman did, saying that was exactly the attitude that has divided the country.

Newt’s bodyslam of Romney after Romney went through a bald face BS representation of himself as a businessman who’s not interested in a political career and only now, just decided to get back into politics just to altruistically help America. Newt said, “I realize the red light doesn’t mean anything to you because you’re the frontrunner, but can we drop the pious baloney?”

This was a bad debate for Romney. Santorum, Huntsman and Gingrich landed solid blows to Romney’s honesty and image and for Obama fans, the sight of Romney being so easily startled and struggling with a pained phony smile when being busted on his BS, should give even stronger confidence and encouragement that Mitt has a glass jaw and can’t take a real pounding.

Overall, I think Huntsman came out the biggest winner. He stood out as far more principled and legit than Romney.

Santorum seemed shaky and didn’t have the presence of a potential president.

Ron Paul was Ron Paul.

Newt looked weak and compromised when he wasn’t landing punches on Romney.

Perry was again irrelevant and invisible and his repeated references to his brain freeze in a previous debate only causes more damage by making people remember he’s a dolt.

Romney didn’t do anything or suffer any injuries that would alienate those faithful to him but I think we’ll see some more decline in his numbers as people see his phoniness and BS exposed more.

In the end, Romney still looks to be the eventual nom but NH may pop his balloon a bit and give him a much smaller than anticipated margin of victory…which could reduce his performance in SC.

Either way, for those who are watching these debates, it seems clearer and clearer that in a face off with Obama, Romney will look like a fragile and hollow empty suit and a prolific liar to boot.

The Obama campaign may have been more concerned in the past about Romney running against them but based on his performance, I think they should be much less concerned.

I was way too joyfully asleep to watch round 2 of the New Hampshire debates. After getting up, I looked up Newt’s wikipedia page and there it says he DID get a deferment to keep his chicken hawk ass out of Vietnam.
I couldn’t find much about his father, Newton S. McPherson.

😆 I’m making it a point to drop off early tonight, there will be no more peeking. For all of you brave enough to sit, stand, run around in circles or hop your way through another one, I’ll wish you good luck. Stay strong, I’ve left a few bottles of smelling salts by the bar, next to the freshly made popcorn.